“If you don’t mind my boots,” he said.

The woman went first, the lamplight washing over paintings of horses, men, land. Behind the postilion came a dog, a hunting animal of some type, with a long snout and slender legs. He didn’t hear it, it came so quietly.

At the top of the stairs he paused to find his breath, then followed the woman down a panelled corridor to a panelled door and past the door into a bedchamber, the chill of a room that had passed all winter unvisited and fireless.

“On there,” she said, nodding to the bed. Then, more to herself, added, “If I had known. If I had been told. If I had been told something . . . ”

By the light of the lamp they both looked down, silently, at the man on the bed. The woman moved the lamp down the length of his body. “Those aren’t his clothes,” she said.

“No?”

A brown civilian coat that had once belonged to a bigger man. A waistcoat that looked to have been cut from a blanket. Grey trousers patched with all sorts, with squares of leather and brown fustian and a dark material—red?—that might be oilcloth. Both his feet were wound with strips of cloth.

“Where are his boots?” she asked.

“He is as I had him from the Swans. No boots and no hat.”

“No bags?”

“One. A small one. Down in the cab.”

She looked at the postilion, took proper notice of him for the first time. He wasn’t from the village or the next village or the next, though she might have seen him somewhere, going about his work. A thin face touched by weather and the strong drink all men in his trade needed and relished. But there was a keenness there, a kindness too, that put her in mind of the preacher she had seen riding past the house the end of last year’s apple picking, one of the new sort who spoke in the open air to miners and field labourers and servants. Even in Radstock.

“The landlord,” said the postilion, “told me he had come up from the coast the day before. From Portsmouth.”

“Portsmouth?”

“That’s what he said. And that there were soldiers back from Spain, some without eyes or legs, just lying in the streets.”

“Sweet mercy,” she said. “But not the officers, surely?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Well, those are not his clothes,” she said. “I know all his clothes.”

“You keep house here, I suppose.”

“I do,” she said. “An empty house.”